There is this constant refrain in the journalism-blogging dialogue, about how we need to support the institutions of journalism because bloggers don’t have the resources that a real newsroom has. The classic example is the Baghdad Bureau of the New York Times, which costs millions of dollars a year, and reporters are putting their lives on the line to go there, and bloggers are less likely to do that.

That’s all true, but you can also say that actually, newsrooms have very limited resources. I know this as a managing editor: you have X number of people, and X cubed number of stories: you’re constantly making difficult choices about what to cover and what not to cover; you’re constantly thinking about how you’re deploying your troops; you’re always thinking about how you’re spending your limited newshole.

The news world is a world of constrained resources. That’s more so today, but it has always been like that. And the blogger who cares about some particular subject really doesn’t have the same constraints.